CHAPTER V
Decapitation, we call it. Founded on the bend of the Mississippi River, New Orleans was claimed for Louis 14 in 1699, making it the only U.S. city in which French was the prevailing language for more than 100 years. The area was slow to settle, but a trade route by water was established, with crops of indigo, rice, and tobacco all produced on Louisiana plantations. When Louisiana became a U.S. territory in 1803, some Creoles resented the upstart Americans who arrived in their city.
The military came in, and they set up evac, medvac, and other different units. They were stationed throughout the city anywhere from the Westbank, Convention Center, Superdome, at various points of the Interstate, and anyone that needed medical attention was sent to one of those. Evacuees received hepatitis shots, tetanus shots, and received any needed medical assistance. The National Guard came around. They were the ones who would drive around every day. They would stop and talk to the people. They mostly said that they had no idea what was going, and they didn’t know where to get help.
They had no rules of engagement and either no ammunition for their rifles or just two or three rounds. Some of them had just returned from Iraq and knew how to secure an area, so policemen were posted at the gun stores to prevent the looting of more guns and ammunition and secured our station. The acts of valor and of lawlessness by the members of the police department themselves were like the different between Jesus and the devil.
The apparent looting of a Cadillac dealership by police. A large number of policemen were driving around Cadillac and Escalante vehicles Helicopters started finally flying over Saturday and Sunday night. They would illuminate the entire street and light up the entire block. The cops would drive by, looking for people. If you were outside, they yelled at you, shot you, or hauled you away. That afternoon, the Red Berets started marching. They were in their military riot gear with red berets on. They all turned and came up Orleans Street, and then they came up to Dauphine Street. The police and military dumped people in the middle of nowhere.
It was never about evacuation. It was about putting everybody in one spot so they can keep an eye on him or her. It was like summer camp with machine guns. There were giant police barricades scattered throughout the city. They were not letting people through. The media increasingly refer to evacuees as refugees. New Orleans Mayor refute the term “These are not refugees. They are American citizens!” Unfortunately the experiences of many of the survivors of Katrina left them feeling like refugees. Search and Rescue ran all the way through November. The Coast Guard, in the initial phase of it, used I-10 by Causeway, as more of a drop-off shelter. From the Convention Center, a lot of people were being air-lifted and dropped there, and buses were moving people out. It was total mayhem. The few cars still left were being hijacked.
There was continuous gunfire from the projects. The four-building compound on Napoleon and Magazine was under siege. The police were outmanned and out-armed. The National Guard is overwhelmed. There’s nothing they can do at this point. The ones doing the search and rescue missions, they’re being attacked by people in the neighborhoods. They’re being shot at while they’re trying to rescue people, so they had to give that up.
Police were everywhere. Every time you made a camp, police were waving guns, yelling, “Everybody move.” Guns in your face every day. Everybody looks like zombies walking around. The military was losing patience and feeling threatened. Then the water went out. Apparently, they turned the water off because there were dead people in it. There were piles of garbage as tall as a grown human. People were shitting everywhere because there were no toilets. There was no anything. Those things people used to love and enjoy are part of a distant memory now.
Now it’s time for a new beginning and a fresh start. It’s time to start a new life that is not only laden with possibilities, but also branded by loss. It’s a shame, but it’s reality; life must go on. Once it became dark, it was very dark. It was becoming more and more violent. Houses had been washed away, with nothing but concrete steps remaining. The storm’s powerful winds splintered homes as if they were built out of Popsicle sticks.
The mighty storm surge wiped some buildings clean away, leaving only concrete slabs. Oak trees whose graceful branches once dipped to the ground lie upended, their root-balls exposed to the air. The entire Mississippi River Delta, including the city of New Orleans, is slowly disappearing into the Gulf of Mexico.
The state is still losing a football field’s worth of land every 90 minutes. By the time Katrina washed ashore, relatively little had been accomplished to stem wetland loss or address land subsidence in urban areas, leaving the New Orleans region more exposed to storms than ever. It was one disaster that would soon lead to another. Katrina didn’t just kill more than 1,000 people and flood nearly 200,000 homes in the New Orleans area; the storm created a whole new set of environmental problems, from contamination and trash to increase erosion.
The hurricane flooded 80 percent of New Orleans, the swirling water sweeping up dirt, pesticides, bacteria, chemical waste and other debris, and distributing them throughout the city in a layer of brown muck. Environmental activists warned of a “toxic gumbo” that could render the entire area a hazardous waste dump. Another massive problem: disposing of waste and debris from the storm- including downed trees, flooded cars, malodorous refrigerators, soggy drywall, moldy carpeting, asbestos roofing tiles and household chemicals.
Officials estimated that Katrina created 22 million tons of debris. New Orleans’s topography presented a challenge for effective drainage. Older parts of the city built on the natural levee enjoyed reasonable drainage, but as the city expanded off the higher ground into the low-lying former swamps, there was little slope to permit gravity to move runoff toward Lake Pontchartrain.
In addition, relict ridges stood between the city and the lake and made drainage even more problematic. The storm surge and high waves destroyed most building s on Grand Isle and topped eleven feet at the Mississippi River fishing community of Venice.
Pumping of the flooded areas continued for several days. A fundamental approach used by engineers was to employ protective structures around the more urbanized and built-up sections of New Orleans. The massive hurricane levee system could not protect against the secondary threat dropped from the heavens. Hurricane protection provision became a perpetual process. The hot water of the Gulf of Mexico helped cook Katrina into a monstrous category five storm with sustained winds of 175 miles per hour and gusts reaching 215 mph.
It began as a barely noticeable wisp of wind. The waters were unusually warm even for that time of year, and as moist air was drawn up into the shifting winds above, a number of modest thunderstorms began to form and then, gradually, to merge into a larger and more continuous weather system. As this particular weather system grew in size, it began to rotate slowly, and in doing so, it soon began to suck up more and more moisture from the surface of the ocean below. In a way, the weather system was beginning to look and behave like a living creature- it was developing its own life force. It had become a selfreinforcing spiral that generated its own momentum and its own energy.
They draw their energy from the warmth of the waters below, and as a consequence of the earth’s own rotation as it moves through space, they take on a strange and often terrifying spin, which in the Northern Hemisphere churns counterclockwise.
Hurricanes bring with them fierce winds, lashing rains, and, most lethally, punishing storm surges. Unlike a tsunami, which is a wave that suddenly shoots across an otherwise calm sea, a storm surge is more like an abnormally high tide, an enormous rise in the height of the ocean itself, on the top of which the winds build waves, which worsen the destruction as they crash into the shore.
In sum, the storm surge consists of battering waves riding atop a concentrated, terrible mass of water. The surges that usually do the greatest harm are those caused by the “right hook” of the swirling storm, where the winds, racing around their own core, are at the same time propelled forward by the trajectory of the storm itself. As the winds spiral in a counterclockwise direction past what would be six on the face of a clock, and then circle full bore toward three, the clock face itself is moving forward- in effect further increasing the speed of the winds, and worse, driving them across open water and directly toward the land.
Disasters are thus a kind of parenthetical insertion, located within the ordinary sweep of events but kept conceptually separate nevertheless. As conventionally understood, a “disaster” begins with a sudden spurt of misbehavior from natural systems that are otherwise far more orderly-the shaking of formerly solid earth, the arrival of a fast-moving tsunami, the moment when a hurricane slams into land.
They end with the arrival of the people we call “the authorities,” who announce that the natural misbehaviors have ended and that humans are once again in charge starting the process of bringing back the patterns that we think of as being normal or ordinary and hence reassuring.
The hurricane’s winds push the water in front of the storm, and, as the storm nears shore, the water builds up even higher, much as snow piles up in front of a snow shovel. The winds roar, blowing so fiercely that large and ordinarily stationary objects- billboards, roofs, trucks, and more- turned into deadly missiles.
Water is everywhere, not just falling from the skies and driving painfully with the wind, but, even worse, rising from the seas, creating such chaos and destruction that even the most hardened of observers are often stunned by the storm’s deadly power.
By the time the eye of the hurricane was passing to the east of New Orleans, at roughly 9:00 a.m. on August 29, the city’s physical protection structures had begun to fail- some catastrophically. Over the next several days, the organizational responses would show even greater failures. The flawed defense system- both in terms of its physical and of its human and organizational components- created enough of an “un-natural” catastrophe to qualify as a disaster in its own right, in some ways just as stunning as the physical destructiveness of the storm itself.
A lingering storm has more time to tear up the landscape- and usually compounds wind damage with greater amounts of rain. Whatever the reason, without doubt the Gulf was hot. Its usual influx of cool northern water from the Mississippi River had been choked off by Midwest drought. And air temperatures along the Gulf Coast had been scorching in the preceding weeks, helping drive water temperatures above 85 degrees in many places.
Not only was the Gulf water hot, the hot water ran deep- two hundred feet deep in one area sampled- thanks in part to the presence of a “loop current,” an appendage of the Gulf Stream that had broken free and was rotating around the Gulf of Mexico, spreading the superheated water. These conditions, eminently favorable for hurricane development, might have been checked by two countervailing forces: wind shear that can rip apart the upper levels of a swirling storm system, and dry air sufficient to sap the cyclone of its self-sustaining moisture.
Instead, two days before landfall, for all her sprawling girth, Katrina had begun to manifest some of the nerve-racking precision of a tight and deadly tornado, a tornado not yards-wide like the funnels that spin across the dusty Great Plains but hundreds of miles in diameter. The hurricane had entered what meteorologists call the “eye-wall replacement cycle,” spinning the clouds at its center-the fastest moving part of the whole dreadful machine- faster and faster until they flew apart, only to be replaced after a brief lull in wind velocity by a new eye wall, spinning as fast or faster still.
The cyclone, in other words, had begun to pulse, almost to pant with thirst. To slake that thirst, the Gulf had welled up into a dome of water as vast and wide as the storm itself, a huge and churning vortex that lifted sea levels yards above normal as the water was sucked skyward into the vacuum at the storm’s very center. The strength of that vacuum was reflected in the plunging barometric pressures characteristic of a hurricane, 920 millibars in Katrina’s case, one of the lowest readings on record. 19 Besides ravaging the man-made landscape, Katrina took a toll on the natural environment.
Satellite images from the U.S. Geological Survey’s National Wetlands Research Center showed that Katrina’s raging winds and pounding waves devastated the fragile coast. Scientists estimated that the storm destroyed more than 100 square miles of wetlands, including chopping up the Chandeleur Islands, an important barrier island chain.
Hurricanes can be regarded as totally natural, the question is, if we have a stressed ecosystem, how does it recover from a disturbance? It’s hard to say exactly how much damage Katrina would have caused if Louisiana still had its protective barrier of coastal land. As early as the 1960s, scientists found that wetlands reduced hurricane storm surges by 1 foot for each 2.7 miles of wetland the storm crossed. About 80 miles of restored coastal marsh below New Orleans would have prevented most of the flooding from Hurricane Katrina.
The breaches in the floodwalls protecting New Orleans are exhibit A in one of the biggest engineering blunders in American history. Katrina’s storm surge overwhelmed the city’s levee system and flooded dozens of neighborhoods on the east side of town and adjacent St. Bernard Parish- some in the space of minutes.